New Years' Resolutions for 2017
It might be a little early for this, but I keep getting people asking me what my New Years' Resolutions are for this year. Now, new years resolutions are notorious for not getting fulfilled. They've got a very low statistical probability of actually getting done. Last year, I gave a bunch of resolutions, and... it's kind of hard to describe what happened. With most of them, I didn't fulfill them technically, but I did fulfill them in spirit. Many of them was "write the first draft of this work." Instead of that, I wrote the first draft, second draft, and all of the drafts to the final ones of a different product that wasn't on the list at all. So, it's hard to tell how well I did over the last year. So, who knows what I'll actually accomplish this year? Resolution #1: Make 3 Reviews Per Month (36 reviews total) So, last year one of my resolutions was to make one review per week for a total of 52. I made it to 34, which is around 70% of my goal. However, I also had to deal with internal cysts, chronic insomnia, and a plethora of other problems, so I think that I did very good. And besides that, I think that this year the reviews that I did do took a step up. I'm not saying that every review was fantastic, but this year has a higher percentage of reviews that would be in my "Top Reviews ever" than any year previously I've done this. Top 20 Worst Themes; Norm of the North; Shark Tale; Painbow; The Telescope; Homer Badman; Peter-Assment. All of those reviews could line up in my top 20 favorite reviews of all time. Now that I have an editor, I do want to up the pace more than 2016, but I don't want to drop that quality. I've got a lot of bigger projects that I want to tackle. Speaking of which... Resolution #2: Do 5 Movie Reviews So, over the course of 2016, I reviewed Shark Tale; Meet the Robinsons; ''and ''Norm of the North. You might include Rapsittie Street Kids in there, because it's longer than 40 minutes, which is what is technically required to be a feature film. But, a lot of the material that I want to cover that I still haven't is... movies. One thing that I know that I have to do is Atlantis II. That's pretty much a gaurentee. The only reason I'm procrastinating on that movie specifically is because it's a sequel. It involves watching two movies back-to-back and knowing where to pull footage from each of them. Then there's that Alice in Wonderland... thing. I'm going to be entirely honest, I don't exactly know how to review it. Remember that the story is an audio play which is pretty much a word-for-word reading of the original Lewis Carrol novel. I made the mistake of watching the behind the scenes commentary of the video, and it's um... most interesting things I've seen for a long time. It's one of those things where you seriously wonder how serious the people in it are. It features such beautiful things like the producer who framed his camera so badly that he was practically half off of the shot. And amazing quotes like "That's what we tried to do with this film. We tried to make it entertaining for you. We tried to be very creative with our characters. And we tried to make them very colorful. We tried to be funny. We hope it worked." Exact words, emphasis his, not mine. And then the director says "this artist drew every character you see in the movie." While the artist says "the youngest artist on this film was only ten years old." So, I don't know if they're... lying, or acting or just very, very confused. Half of it feels like everyone is sarcastically blaming each other for what happened. I think to give a review of this any substance, I'd have to do things like draw Alice myself for instance. And I've also got my eyes on the Emoji Movie. I'm not going to lie, I expect it to be terrible. It's a dead-in-the-water concept to begin with that at best can probably fall into the cliches of 3D animated movies (what if the not alive WAS ALIVE!?). And not to mention the trailer. It basically translates to "we know this movie is shit, so we're not even gonna try." I kind of want to see this movie though, just out of morbid curiosity. I really think they should have avoided using the meh emoji as their spokesperson, because even the poster looks like it doesn't give a shit. Resolution #3: Do 1 Sketch a Day: 'Pictionary Practice - 365 days of drawing So, last year, one of my resolutions was to learn how to draw. Now, I had to spend less and less time doing that as the novel slowly took over my life. That, and "learn to draw" is actually very vague which almost certainly dooms a resolution to failure. So, once every day (or twice the next day if I miss one due to I dunno... surgery) I'm going to pull a card from Pictionary/a pictionary generator and just sketch it a bunch of times. And that's the bare minimum of what I'll do while drawing each day. I'm obviously going to have to do more than that, but I think that it should help. In order to get a steady stream of difficulty, ''Tabletop Simulator has a version of Pictionary where the cards are divided into five difficulties, 60 cards in each pile. I'll do easy and then move on to medium and so on. After all 300 are used, I'll be using a generator. And unless the card is a repeat or inappropriate, I'll have to draw it. I can't ram it back into the deck. Also, considering I'm nocturnal, it means that I get to start this one tomorrow. '''Resolution #4: Make a Video Game So, in 2016 I wrote a novel. It was one of those things that I wanted to do since I was a little kid. The other one of those things that I wanted to do as a little kid was make a video game. It doesn't have to be anything big or complex, but it has to be a complete game - not just a demo, like I did with Epic! The Humorous RPG from awhile back. I'm probably going to use the same generator I did before, the OHRRPGCE and use it to make a turn-based RPG. I've already got a concept and an idea for the general direction of the story. The thing that plagued me before now was making interesting dungeons. Not... great dungeons, just dungeons that don't amount to "a maze" or "keep walking for a long, long time." Resolution #5: Growing Around So, in case you didn't notice, I just rewrote the pilot. Growing Around Pilot - Attempt #2 (Draft 1). After I get all of the feedback that I can possibly get on it, this is going to be the actual first episode of the cartoon. With some polish, I can move forward on it. I'm not gonna say "this is going to be done by the end of the year" because it takes a professional team 6-9 months to animate something like this, and that's after storyboarding, background artist, character finalization, voice acting, and music. Remember that brief animated bit from my Top 20 Worst Themes list? That took over a week to do. Actually getting this done is the absolute end goal. However, I would like to be closer. Something else that I think I could get going is a 1-2 minute animated short advertising the series and the book and hopefully getting some attention to it, so I could further fund all of the little bits and pieces that are required. A brief trailer is probably the next thing that I'm going to write for the series anyway. Resolution #6: Write something new And every once in awhile, we need to change things up. I want to write a new story, not based on any plots or ideas that I've had mulling over in the past (or something vastly different from its original vision). I don't want to get caught in the trap of working on just the same project for my entire life because I'm afraid to move on or that I'll be lost. Not many resolutions this year, but I don't want to get overwhelmed. And even 6 major things is quite a lot. There are some more I have, but it's largely personal stuff. Category:Miscellaneous